An Analysis of the Ownership and Customer Support Activities of Mutual Insurance Companies

The existing studies of mutual organizations help us understand what it means at the strategic level for an insurance company to be owned by its customers. At the same time, there is limited literature illustrating what customer ownership means at the operations level and how operative activities contribute to achieving the strategic goals. By taking a managerial perspective, we explore and identify how managers of mutual insurance companies understand and communicate the influence of customer ownership in organizing operative support activities. For a thematic analysis of annual reports, we identified 18 mutual insurers in seven different countries (Finland, Ireland, The Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, and United States). As the first attempt to provide analytical meaning and approach to managing support activities in a customer-owned mutual company, the findings point to several new and interesting research avenues, and they informed the creation of a tentative framework that mutual insurance managers can exploit.